The public release of Australia’s Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) was announced late last year with a scheduled release for some time in February. While no specific date has been announced, SpatialSource spoke to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet who advised that final preparations for the release are being made and that it is expected that G-NAF will be openly available through data.gov.au before the end of this month. Keep tuned to SpatialSource to find out when it is released.
The public release of G-NAF marks one of the first initiatives of the Federal government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA), which charts a clear course for Australia’s public and private sectors and aims to aims to launch new technological and industrial research.
In the announcement of the release Prime Minister Turnbull highlighted the importance of spatial open data: “Spatial data, in particular, is becoming increasingly important to the economy given the rapid take-up and use of mobile devices in Australia,” he said.
In addition to G-NAF, a newly established Digital Marketplace will seek to redirect investment into Australia’s slow-growing, yet limitless knowledge economy. Additionally, the new $1.1 billon approach to commercialisation of innovative technologies has already seen new investment into key research areas.
The release of G-NAF is part of a new agreement between the Australian Federal Government and PSMA Australia Limited (PSMA), which will see the release of one of the most requested ubiquitous, high-value datasets to the economy. Created by PSMA G-NAF is a complex database consisting of more than 30 tables of data and 13.5+million principal addresses.
It is built from addresses supplied by ten contributors including the land agencies in each state and territory of Australia. It also consists of the official land administration boundaries, which includes six themes: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) boundaries, electoral boundaries, state and territory boundaries, local government areas, suburbs/localities, and town points.
G-NAF and its associated administrative boundaries will be published under an open data licence at no cost to end users through open data portal data.gov.au. The G-NAF will be provided as a pipe separated value (psv) file and the administrative boundaries dataset will be provided as an Esri shapefile and updated on a quarterly basis.
While the release marks a turning point for Australian open data, the raw format provided by the federal government will be markedly different from the value-added format of G-NAF supplied by third party vendors as it requires significant data handling and geocoding abilities for most applications.
